EVEN though a GHȻ100, 000 reprieve has been given them, the eight National Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential candidate aspirants who had petitioned the Council of Elders of the party leading to the reduction of the filling fee will be pushing for a further reduction of the fee, one of the candidates who does not want to be named had told the Ghanaian Times.

The NDC had pegged their filling fee for their upcoming presidential primary at GHȻ400,000 but had to reduce it to GHȻ300,000 after the eight aspirants had petitioned the Council of Elders of the party arguing that the amount was outrageous and inconsistent with the party’s values following a public outcry.

The eight which petitioned the Council of Elders were Second Deputy Speaker, Alban Bagbin; former Minister of Trade and Industry, Ekow Spio-Garbrah; former Vice Chancellor of the University of Professional Studies Accra and former National Health Insurance Authority boss Sylvester Mensah.

The rest are founding member of the party, Goosie Tanoh, former Kumasi Metropolitan Chief Executive; Kojo Bonsu, businessman; Nurideen Iddrisu, private legal practitioner; Elipklim Agbemava and Stephen Atubiga, a former parliamentary candidate aspirant of the party for Binduri.

According to the anonymous aspirant, a second petition was due to be submitted to the Council of Elders for the fee to be further reduced to GHȻ200,000.

The source explained that in their meeting with the Council of Elders, they had agreed that the aspirants would pay GHȻ150,000 as filling fee and a voluntary contribution of GHȻ50,000 to support the organisation of the congress.

“We were actually shocked to hear that the filling fee was reduced to GHȻ300, 000 instead of the GHȻ150, 000 for the filling we had agreed plus the GHȻ50, 000 contributions to support congress.

“So we will be presenting a second petition to the Council of Elders to remind them on the agreement we had reached with them,” he said.

Touching on the terms and conditions of picking nomination and filling same, the source said the National Executive Committee was to fizzle out some candidates in the race.

For example, he said in the race for national offices, aspirants had six weeks to submit their nomination forms but in the case of the presidential aspirants, they were given ten days to collate two signatures each from all the 275 constituencies.